Spirited Away.
Cozy Grove’s hand-drawn aesthetic is incredibly well suited to the tone and charm the game exudes. While you’ll have a few graphical oddities of pieces overlapping over one another, developer Spry Fox has crafted a visually stunning experience in Cozy Grove that may just fill that need of moving on from something like Animal Crossing, while striving to become its own thing, one spirit bear at a time.
The game has you arriving at a little spot of paradise called Cozy Grove as a Spirit Scout, one tasked with assisting various spirits with an assortment of daily, and sometimes weekly, tasks, pulling them back into the real world as you track down a wealth of resources, crafting supplies, and more of their ghostly friends. While the premise of spirits and ghosts may invoke some aspects of horror or the supernatural, Cozy Grove is instead charming and adorable. The hand-drawn appeal of what has been done here compliments that so, with gorgeous artwork, characters, and environments, that are often jaw-dropping when you start to bring back its colorful residents, creating small little pockets of neighborhoods and structures throughout your progress.
Each completion of a spirit’s task causes their return to the living world to be with an explosion of color, flowing out as it covers a solid distance all around them. You can extend this color by aiding nearby spirits around them, and crafting, or buying, various lamps that grant their own area of color against the black and grey surroundings that make up the rest of Cozy Grove. Environments are littered with various trees, plants, rocks, and items that complement the person nearby, such as postal scooters and undelivered packages near the postman, or a collection of farming equipment surrounding a corn-on-the-cob bear.
At the start of your journey, and at any point thereafter, you can create your character, a genderless avatar that will horde an insane amount of clothing; everything from hats, face masks, shirts, and even more costume pieces like a knight’s helmet or that of a hat matching your more grizzly residents. While you’ll receive a clothing item or two from your quests, the bulk of your wardrobe will be purchased at the shop, run by a large fox named Mr. Kit, who is always set up and wanting your business, all while sporting a small little mouse atop his large boxy forehead.
Cozy Grove follows a daily loop, much in the same way as Animal Crossing, using a real-time system where a special character may only show up on a certain day of the week, or when the game says to check back tomorrow, they literally mean tomorrow. Apart from scavenging the island for resources until you exhaust your patience, or partake in a spot of fishing, you’ll find Cozy Grove to give you around 30-40 minutes per day of tasks that can be completed, or at least worked on enough before you’ll need a day’s replenishment of harvesting rocks or a refresh of the shop. That, and anything you’ve ordered or crafted that needs to be sent through the postal service to eventually find its way to you. For those who want something they can spend the entire day playing, well, you’ll likely have to change your clock settings to the next day to keep that progress going once you’ve expanded your options for the day. Keep in mind that time travel is different on each console, with Xbox requiring you to do it offline only.
This loop always starts the same way, you’ll wake up at your campsite, which you can keep evolving into better digs, and discover that many of your bear friends that make up this island will have reverted back to their ghostly forms, requiring your aid once again. You’ll harvest items for them, track down a parcel or two, or maybe a few ingredients or some colored leaves. Each of these requests allows you to get to know them better, as you’ll unlock new story bits of their lives before you came to the island. Now, I’ll be honest, the charm of the interactions with these characters only lasts so long, and eventually, you’ll find yourself skipping the dialogue here and there. It’s not that writing is bad because it is often rather witty and amusing, but the loop loses a bit of its variety after a while, and the requests themselves either start to become week-long resources hunts or simply grab and go fetch quests.
That said, the fetch quests can often be fun, but it is when you’ll need to collect a week’s worth of items for a single task where it becomes a tad bit tedious. I had to make a boiled egg, and it requires 12 eggs to do. While Mr. Kit sells one per day, finding them around the island was a rare occurrence. Sure, you can wait for the special character that arrives on Wednesdays, but as I started that quest on a Thursday, it took me the entire week just to complete it as no quest giver gave me eggs as a reward. And, when I had all the eggs, I went to convert them into a boiled egg (serious tho, 12 eggs to make one boiled egg?) it arrived in the mail an hour later, only to disappear from my inventory as I collected it, causing me to race to the merchant that luckily arrived that day and buy more.
As you accomplish certain tasks, you’ll be gifted a spirit log, one you’ll feed to your campfire. This fire, who is its own character, will also serve as your housing space, wardrobe, and has the ability to burn objects and food, causing them to evolve into other items, or simply as a way to cook certain ingredients. Each spirit log levels them up, and after a set amount has been fed, they will unlock more of the island. This often includes a new visitor for you to add as a part of your daily loop. You can always tell where the next area will open up due to it partially poking itself up through the water that surrounds you, a wealth of blue water loaded with fish for the taking.
One issue I found present nearly every day I played, was that if I placed too many items around certain characters or if there was a mining resource directly next to them, it would often choose that instead of talking to them. This was most noticeable in my camp that was littered with birds that grant you special items when you feed them. While I eventually moved them to their own beach, it was a hassle feeding them as I would stand in front of them, click A, and my character would wander off to the nearby fence, wanting me to move it. To make matters worse, I would often not be able to interact with them as the prompt just wouldn’t pop up. I would reset the game and it would fix it, but in a game built about interaction, this was a huge annoyance as it happened at least once per 30-40 minute session.
Cozy Grove is certainly a much different game than Animal Crossing while having a very similar appeal, but it also tackles two quality of life features here that I wish beyond all else that Nintendo would add into their little island sim; Universal inventory, and auto-tool use. Cozy Grove allows you to place items into your campsite via your fire, and apart from handing items directly to characters, your need for crafting objects or food allows you to keep those items in your stashed inventory and yet use them anywhere you go. I can keep all my resources for crafting back at my camp and yet use them at the nearby crafting station without having to have them on me. As you wander around, you’ll find buried items, random piles of leaves, or rocks for mining that require a tool, and you simply have to press A and your character will automatically pick the right tool and just use it. These two gameplay systems really make a world of difference considering the frequency you rely on them.
As you tackle certain jobs, interactions, or collecting certain items, you’ll have a few systems that aid you in keeping track. Similar to Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you’ll record various events here that you’ve completed, which present you with a variety of rewards through a system called Badges, since, you know, you are a Scout. It’s a fun system to keep in mind as you may have a few items on you that you need to hand in to add to your ever-growing collection. Charlotte Pine, the first bear you’ll meet, allows you to check in on your ghost-bear friend’s memories that you have unlocked, letting you revisit certain story moments. They also allow you to pay money to track down items that are hidden around the island, in case you can’t find that cup of coffee or blue leaf anywhere. I’ll also point out that each item in the quest log gives you hints like “I think I saw it near a tarp.” as a way to guide you along.
As I’ve mentioned before, Cozy Grove is gorgeous. Its 2D hand-drawn look is infectious, with detail that could not be done had this been a full 3D or fake 3D in the way that Animal Crossing handles some of its visuals. I do have a few issues with not knowing what I can walk over and it is very inconsistent, or that a few of its assets will overlap as the dock below my camp has a land asset covering half of it, as seen below. Still, this is without question the best-looking life sim I’ve ever played and consistently impressed me as I unlocked more and more of the island. Alongside its charming visuals is a very decent set of a few songs you’ll hear throughout your journey. While the music is pleasant, the game could have benefitted from a few more tracks to not have them become less impressive due to their repetition.
Cozy Grove is an interesting mixture of something like Animal Crossing and Spiritfarer, blending the two games into a very interesting combination. The stories you’ll unlock are enjoyable, despite losing a lot of their charm with some of the more mundane tasks you’ll be given. Had their been more options to gather certain resources a bit quicker, especially when you need to make a gold bar, then I likely wouldn’t have felt so burnt out on handing in sometimes just a single week-long quest. Still, Cozy Grove does a tremendous more right than wrong, with a wealth of quality of life updates that other games in the genre could take a lesson from.
Developer - Spry Fox. Publisher - Spry Fox. Released - March 19th, 2021. Available On - Xbox One/S/X, Nintendo Switch, PS4/5, Windows PC, Mac, Apple Arcade. Rated - (E10+) Alcohol Reference, Crude Humor. Platform Reviewed - Xbox Series X. (Playing Xbox One version) Review Access - Cozy Grove was purchased by the reviewer.